At Georgetown, you always had to go through John Thompson Jr. to get to Patrick Ewing, and more than three decades later nothing much has changed. You need to enter the new campus facility named after Thompson. You need to pass the bronze statue of the bespectacled coach, whose likeness stands with arms folded and a towel dangling from his shoulder while he stares through someone in the distance.
To see Ewing, you need to go four floors up in the Thompson Center, where the elevator opens wide to an outsized picture of Ewing in his No. 33 jersey and omnipresent gray T-shirt, his 8-foot wingspan stretching from wall to wall. At 55, roaming the hallways above the practice court while checking his cell messages, Ewing looks every bit the towering presence he was during those years in the 1980s when he made the Big East the Big East.
If you spend a few decades around basketball players, you know that standing beside 7-footers like Ewing as an average-size man can be an interesting experience. Some appear to be a mere 6-foot-8. Ewing? He always appeared to be 7-foot-4.
He is Georgetown’s head coach now. In other words, he has Thompson’s job in Thompson’s building, where Thompson still keeps an office. The man who first called Ewing and told him he needed to pursue this opening? John Thompson Jr., right after his son, John Thompson III, was fired by the very school his old man put on the basketball map.
It was an awkward series of events, but it made sense, too, since Big John has always looked after Bigger Patrick. Thompson started protecting Ewing in 1981, when the center from Cambridge, Massachusetts, ended the mother of all high school recruiting wars in an announcement at a Boston restaurant owned by Thompson’s former Celtics teammate Satch Sanders. The coach had made quite an impression in his visit with the Ewing family. “He spoke extremely well; he carried himself with class,” Ewing recalls. “And as a young black man, he was somebody I could be like.” The recruit was most struck by Thompson’s way with words. “I was mesmerized.”
Ewing wanted Thompson to keep doing the talking for him at Georgetown, where “Hoya paranoia” was born of the restricted access to the phenom. “A lot of times,” Ewing recalls, “he took the hit, especially for me, if I didn’t speak. … I didn’t like speaking to the media. Growing up in Boston, I learned from a young age that the media builds you up, and at a certain point they start chopping you down.”
But all these years later, Thompson won’t be able to protect Ewing from anything. Big John remains a father confessor to Ewing, and yet he will not be making halftime speeches or diagramming plays on the board. This is Ewing’s program now. He has never been a head coach on any level, and he will rise or fall on his own.
Enough people out there believe he will fall and that there must be a good reason nobody in the NBA offered him a head-coaching job despite his Hall of Fame playing career and the better part of 15 years as an NBA assistant. And there are plenty of legitimate questions to ask about this monumental gamble Ewing is taking. Can he adjust to college basketball after being away from it for more than 30 years? Can he navigate the sport’s overwhelmingly corrupt feeder system and outrecruit opposing coaches who have far more experience delivering the pitch? Does he have the requisite charisma to persuade some of the nation’s top high school players to sign with Georgetown?
“The college basketball lifestyle is awful,” says Jeff Van Gundy, one of Ewing’s coaches with the New York Knicks. “The job in the NBA is 90 percent coaching, 10 percent everything else. The job in college is 30 percent basketball, 70 percent everything else.”
If the doubters believe that 70 percent will ultimately doom Ewing, his backstory suggests he might just find a way to return the Hoyas to national prominence. Though it isn’t a story he told in his 15 years in New York, where he guarded his inner thoughts as fiercely as he guarded the paint, the Jamaican-born Ewing defines himself as an immigrant who made good against the longest of odds. When he moved to the U.S. at age 12, the idea of Ewing someday becoming the face of one of the nation’s leading academic institutions wasn’t within 10 country miles of possibility.
He made it happen anyway. So Ewing believes he will weather his new career challenges the way he weathered his stormy transition to a new world, shaped by the cancer of racism, to become what he became.
“I’m what America’s all about,” Ewing says. He means the good and the bad.
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